Never Miss an Update.

Refugees Deeply is designed to help you understand the complex web of geopolitical, human rights, environmental, legal and other factors combining to make the refugee issue one of the most challenging of our lifetimes. Our editors and expert contributors are working around the clock to bring you greater clarity and comprehensive coverage.

Sign up to our newsletter to receive our weekly updates, special reports, and featured insights as we widen the lens on this critical – and quintessentially human – issue.

When It Comes to the Refugee Crisis, the Numbers Game Matters

As part of our “This Age of Migration” series, Paul Currion, a former aid worker focused on Afghans returning from Pakistan in the early 2000s, argues that better data and improved understanding of statistics are essential for an informed debate on the refugee crisis.

Afghan refugee girls attend classes at their makeshift school in the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan. Fifteen years after the first refugees returned from Pakistan to their homes in Afghanistan, the problems of Afghan returnees have still not been resolved, notes Paul Currion.
AP/Muhammed Muheisen

The largest refugee crisis since World War II, claim the headlines: 4 million people displaced from Syria.

Yet it isn’t the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. That dubious honor goes to the Partition of India in 1947, when 14 million Muslims and Hindus were forced to move. It’s not even the biggest refugee crisis since World War II in Europe, as 12 million Germans were expelled from various central European countries from the end of the war until 1950.

Welcome to the numbers game, where we try to answer what appears to be the central question: Whose refugee crisis is worse? It’s a pointless game to play, as every crisis is the worst for those who have lost their homes – and not a competition where only the “winners” deserve the world’s attention for their losses.

Yet numbers are important. Without knowing the numbers, it is impossible to make the right decisions about how to respond, with policy or in practice.

It’s natural for states to prioritize their own circumstances regarding population movements. E.U. governments are justified in worrying more about their own countries than about Turkey, but that doesn’t justify a policy perspective in which 1 million migrants arriving in the E.U. are seen as a threat to an entire civilization, while 2.5 million refugees in Turkey is treated as business as usual.

In the long run, it is also not pragmatic to overlook Turkey’s conditions as these refugees will eventually head toward Europe, as they already have, with the largest numbers arriving from the Turkish coast in 2015.

Last year, questions were raised about how Frontex (the E.U. border cooperation agency) counted migrants, leading to Frontex clarifying that a large number of the people “who were counted when they arrived in Greece were again counted when entering the E.U. for the second time through Hungary or Croatia.”

The lack of clarity over how much such double-counting affects the official statistics exposes the difficulties of obtaining accurate statistics related to refugees. When we dig deeper, the problem becomes even more complicated and pressing, as we’ve seen recently with allegations that the E.U. has lost track of as many as 10,000 unaccompanied minors.

It is impossible to confirm the accuracy of the 10,000 figure, and this is a large part of the problem. It could be much larger or smaller due to a lack of coordination between the different European borders and entry points that these children might have passed through. But no matter how shaky a statistic is, when it is picked up by the media, it starts to be treated as a fact. A headline figure such as 10,000 missing children makes for good press, but the half-life of such statistics can make them problematic in the long run, closing down discussions rather than opening up practicable solutions.

Another example of this is the widely-cited figure that the average stay in a refugee camp is 17 years – a figure that turned out to be completely untrue. It is vital to build a clearer picture about where refugees really are, but in this case debunking the figure also runs the risk of obscuring the fact that life in a refugee camp is often intolerable for any amount of time.

Statistics on refugee numbers are flawed for good reasons. There are practical obstacles to accurately counting refugees, especially when they are mobile. There are also methodological questions about exactly who to count, since not everybody who crosses a border is a refugee in the legal sense. Whether they are on the road, or in camps and informal communities, refugee numbers are often vague and always changing.

Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter gives a press statement at the central train station in Munich, Germany. In the background, the statistics read that from Aug. 31, to Sept. 11, 2015 around 51,000 asylum seekers arrived in the city. (Nicolas Armer/dpa via AP)

For example, when the humanitarian community needed to know the potential number of Afghan returnees from Pakistan in 2001, we had no basis for a solid estimate. We simply guessed a number and added 50 percent to it. This might seem irresponsible but there was no alternative, as we needed a basis for planning assistance to returnees. (Fifteen years later, the problems of Afghan returnees have still not been resolved.)

We shouldn’t have to play the numbers game, yet play it we must. It’s the difference between protecting asylum seekers and refugees, or leaving them invisible to the system and hence susceptible to abuse.

Amid the lack of clarity, one fact is not up for debate: The number of people on the move, either voluntarily or involuntarily, is greater than at any point in history. In this age of migration, only better data can provide the basis for better policy, and only better understanding of the statistics will make the debate more constructive.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Refugees Deeply.

Never miss an update.

Sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly updates, special reports and featured insights as we cover one of the most critical issues of our time.

About the Author

Consultant

Paul Currion is a consultant with particular interest in migration, technology and urban resilience. He has worked in a range of humanitarian responses, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia and Darfur.

Never miss an update. Join thousands of industry insiders and get a free weekly wrap-up of need-to-know Refugees Deeply news.

Republish this article

Our mission is to empower stakeholders and the wider public with high quality information, insights, and analysis on critical global issues. To help achieve this, we encourage you to republish the text of any article that contains a Republish button on your own news outlet.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines. Click to expand

We simply ask that you:

Ensure that you include a line of our HTML tracking code on every article you republish. This is a lightweight, efficient way for us to see the number of page views of each specific article published on our partners’ websites. This does not affect page layout, nor does it provide any information about your users, other web pages on your site, or any further data. By copying and pasting the HTML code in the box below, the tracking code is automatically included.

If, for any reason, you do not copy the code prepared for you, please paste this code snippet into the end of the article in your CMS:

Note at the top and/or bottom of the story that it originally appeared on Refugees Deeply. This note should include a direct link to the original article. Also please include a sentence that offers the reader the opportunity to join the Refugees Deeply’s mailing list.

This should read : “This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.”

If you want to republish a photo, contact us. Some sources don't allow their images to be republished without permission.

If you'd like to translate a story into another language, contact us.

We often republish pieces from our partners. If you want to republish a partner’s story, please credit the original partner and include a “via News Deeply” link.

Note that News Deeply considers the publication date to be the date marked on the story, and is not responsible for any content that you choose to repost.

After republication on the partner website, please mention the relevant Deeply social media handle in your social promotion, such as @SyriaDeeply, @WaterDeeply, @WomenGirlsHub on Twitter or tag the appropriate site’s Facebook page.

News Deeply material should not to be provided, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, to third parties or affiliates for redistribution through those entities, unless prior approval has been obtained from News Deeply in writing.

You may not automatically or systematically republish all or the majority of our material from our sites; all stories must be chosen individually.

You may not sell our content or republish it for commercial purposes.

We reserve the right to request that any partner ceases republication of our content, including but not limited to if the guidelines listed above not being followed.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact community@newsdeeply.com